On May 12, the IHS CubeSat Club was announced as one of the winners of the CubeSat Design Competition, which was held in The Museum of Science Fiction in Washington D.C. in partnership with NASA and Cornell University. The other winning contestants were students from Bowie High School in El Paso, Texas and Dulwich School in Suzhou, China. The Museum of Science Fiction held this competition with goals to reward small-scale approaches to designing spacecrafts and encourage future generations of researchers and space explorers.
Entries to the CubeSat Design Competition consisted of a video and a 20-page report that contained graphics, a mission proposal, a description of the CubeSat’s technologies and its potential to become a new business enterprise, and an overview of the projected costs for manufacturing the satellite. They were judged based on creativity, potential for commercialization, technical viability, and budget realism.
“A CubeSat is a nano- or pico-satellite that uses off-the-shelf technologies. Its goal is to support the consumer-based economy of space exploration,” said Isabel Dawson ’18, president of the IHS CubeSat Club. CubeSats measure 10 cm on each side and weigh less than 1.33 kilograms. They have been used to track asteroids, travel to other planets, and orbit the earth while providing data communications. In space, CubeSats are deployed using P-PODs (Poly-Picosatellite Orbital Deployers), which ensure that all satellites conform to standardized physical requirements. While CubeSats must have a certain size, shape, and mass to be allowed as auxiliary payloads on rockets, their versatility and potential for innovation is endless. “You can do whatever you want within the size and shape limitations,” said Kurt Manrique Niño ’16, a member of the club.
The IHS club’s CubeSat, CayugaSat, is most unique for the way it accelerates. It has 4 by 4.5 m solar sails, which are a form of spacecraft propulsion driven by radiation pressure exerted by sunlight as photons hit the sails. Ikaros, a Japanese spacecraft deployed on June 14, 2010, to travel to Venus, was the first spacecraft to successfully use this technology. The CayugaSat has three CubeSat units and is about 30 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm, weighing just about 4 kilograms. Its production budget ended up being about $6,800, well below the $10,000 limit set by the Museum of Science Fiction.
The winning teams of the competition will attend an award ceremony at the Escape Velocity science-fiction convention on July 2, 2016, held in National Harbor, MD. There, hundreds will gather to participate in a science fair and to hear keynote presentations from Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry (the creator of the original Star Trek television series), and Adam Nimoy, the son of Leonard Nimoy (the actor who played Spock), to celebrate Star Trek’s 50th anniversary.
The CayugaSat concept will be sent to Cornell University, where it will be adapted into a working spacecraft. NASA will launch the satellite into earth’s orbit through its CubeSat Launch Initiative. “That was my main motivation to start this club. Who wouldn’t want to have something of their own sent to space?” Dawson said.
Although the team members enjoyed working on their concept and design, with little background in astronautical engineering, they found their experience challenging. “Ultimately,” Manrique Niño said, “this project was an academic endeavor more than anything. I stepped into this project with absolutely no prior knowledge about satellites and astronomy. Since, in space, there is no air resistance of any kind, we had to work in a completely different environment. I spent so much time online to get better educated.”
The IHS CubeSat club is planning on continuing into next year. “We hope to make the club a lot bigger. We also want to spend more time discussing the future of space travel and not just designing CubeSats,” Dawson said. Club members also want to challenge stigmas attached to engineering and hope to collaborate with clubs such as Code Red Robotics to build as well as design. “There were two girls other than myself who came to this club and both dropped out. It’s a big goal of ours to get girls involved in this club next year,” Dawson said.